COURTESY PHOTO
This year’s Marblehead Festival of Arts logo was designed by Brooke Pendelton.
By BILL BROTHERTON
MARBLEHEAD — The Festival of Arts has been a much-anticipated, well-attended part of the town’s July 4 weekend celebration since 1962. Each year, the fest presents visual arts exhibitions, music, writing, boat building, children’s activities and, since 1999, film.
One offshoot of the popular holiday tradition is the Long Winter Short Film Festival, which showcases selected shorts and highlights from the previous summer’s film festival. It will be Wednesday night at 7 in the Abbot Public Library’s lower meeting room.
Mike Evers, co-chair of the Film Committee, said 11 short films will be screened, including documentaries, comedies, animations and personal essay-like reflections. The program lasts about 90 minutes, he said. Admission is free.
“The committee selected these films for their uniquely personal qualities,” said Evers, a Beverly resident. “Some are incredibly timely. In Adam J. Hardy’s ‘Drop It,’ a white police officer shoots and kills an African-American man. The film delves into the feelings of the people. The officer is distraught and the father of the man shot is very angry.
“And ‘Birthday’ by Chris King is told from the point of view of a wife whose Marine husband loses his legs in combat. Their life together will never be the same. It’s powerful, and is on the eligibility list for this year’s Academy Awards.”
Evers is effusive in his praise for “I Don’t Need U” by Alyssa Peguero, a young director from Lynn who made her film through the Real to Reel Film School at RAW Art Works. It won an award at last year’s Arlington International Arts Festival. “A teenage girl feels she’s been ignored by her absent father. He wants to reunite. She blows him off but in ways that are unexpected,” said Evers. “This struck everyone on our committee as a really, raw piece of work. … It made me think of Emily Dickinson’s ‘Tell the truth but tell it slant.’”
Evers, who retired from the Department of Labor in 2001 and worked as an adjunct in the Salem State English Department from 2007-14, calls “Going the Distance” an uplifting work. “The documentary is about runners, all 75 years and older, including a guy in his 90s, who excel at the Penn Relays track competition in Philly. This film won the Grand Jury Award for documentary shorts at the Independent Film Festival of Boston.
Evers and his late wife, Barbara Pabish, got involved in the local arts community shortly after arriving to the North Shore in the 1980s. The Wisconsin native said he basically ran the film festival by himself the first couple of years. It was a lot of work. A committee was formed and collectively its members sought submissions and selected the films to be shown. Since 2013, prizes have been awarded. The Long Winter Short Film Festival has been held annually since 2013, said Evers.
Joining Evers on the all-volunteer Film Committee are co-chair Laurie Stolarz, Steve Krom, James Mahoney, Bill Smalley and Paulina Villarroel. For more information about the films to be shown, visit www.marbleheadfestival.org.
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Bill Brotherton is The Item’s Features editor. He can be reached at [email protected].
